THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 30, 1995 TAG: 9505020455
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
LENGTH: Long : 173 lines
[GEORGE DUGGINS:]
Mr. McNamara, as an American serviceman who served 2 1/2 years in South Vietnam, I have now gone the complete cycle on America's involvement in the Vietnam War.
Your efforts to purge your guilt have not touched my better nature. My better nature is reserved for those who believed your lies, followed your twisted path and met their doom in a war you helped put together.
I have gone from being in favor of the war to realizing it wasn't the best course of action for my country to take. I know my service was honorable; I went in good faith. My efforts were right, even if my country's were not.
I have come to grips with the fact that America lost the war. Some veterans have not accepted that.
I was 21 when I enlisted in the Army after two years of college. I was a hawk. From day one, my generation had been indoctrinated to believe that communism was a dark force and it was every American's job to stop it.
Assigned to an intelligence unit, my job was intercepting the enemy's Morse code. I intercepted messages that probably helped save a lot of lives.
But there was death all around me. My unit was under constant rocket and mortar fire. We were based near an air strip, so close we could see the planes bringing the bodies in.
A buddy I knew from Booker T. Washington High School, a helicopter pilot, was shot down, and it was more than 20 years before his body was found. Every time I go to ``The Wall'' - the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington - I stop and say hello to him. A couple of other guys from home didn't make it back, either.
The war and its aftermath took a great emotional toll on me. We who went to Vietnam were treated as outcasts when we returned. And it was doubly hard for black veterans. We were accused of fighting a white man's war. I found that people who had been my friends were not anymore.
Mr. McNamara, I think you exhibited all the worst in the leadership of the country - before, during and after your government service. Your actions and your motives should be given the widest publicity, simply as an example of where unchecked ego and self-centered arrogance can lead the country. It is no wonder the country has stumbled so badly these last 30 years.
Your further arrogance in revealing the truth behind your conduct has ripped open wounds that had barely begun to heal. Again, you took the weak, easy way out. You should have taken your secrets to the grave with you. Then, only you would have suffered the tortures of the memories of your moral failures and errors.
Instead, in an effort to gain relief from post-traumatic stress disorder, you spread the knowledge of your guilt to those who are least able to either accept or deal with it. I hope you are able to find forgiveness somewhere. You will not find it from me. To think that you held the view that the war was ``wrong, terribly wrong'' - and you were in my chain of command!
Those service members who were jailed for refusing to face the enemy were braver and more honest than you. We who followed our orders, who supported our buddies, who did our best, will go to our final peace knowing that we did the right thing. You will go to your grave knowing that all our service members will now forever doubt the honesty, integrity and support of the people who send them off to war.
But age has mellowed me. While you will never be one of my heroes, I don't view you as the ultimate evil, either - just a dupe of the big business interests that dominated the defense industry at the time. It's a damn shame you couldn't convince the powers that be of the futility of it all.
Many hundreds of thousands of Vietnam veterans are living today with the legacy of that war - those who sustained amputations, physical and psychological wounds that have yet to heal, and illnesses due to exposure to Agent Orange and other carcinogens.
More than a quarter of a million Vietnam-era veterans are homeless.
Vietnam veterans as a group earn approximately 15 percent less than their peers.
The parents and loved ones of more than 2,000 unaccounted-for service members still await information as to their fate.
Mr. McNamara, if your book prevents the tragedies of Vietnam from happening again, great! Maybe your revelations will help with the healing. Maybe, just maybe, everyone - whether they agreed or disagreed with the war - will finally let the warriors have their peace.
[BILL SIZEMORE:] Better late than never, Mr. McNamara.
Coming 20 years after the fact, your published admission that the Vietnam War was a tragic error is a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow. But you were right to 'fess up.
I say that as a member of the Vietnam generation - the last American generation to face a military draft. I was among the majority: those who didn't go.
It seems long ago and far away in these days of the all-volunteer military, but Vietnam was a life-changing reality for us. We were forced to confront issues of great moral and political import at the most personal and visceral level.
Questions like: Was it really vital to U.S. national security to intervene militarily in a bloody civil war on the other side of the world? And if so, were we willing to lay our lives on the line?
Many of us decided, despite all the stern appeals to our patriotism and manhood, that it was too much to ask.
We each dealt with the issue however we could, according to our individual circumstances. Some, like Bill Clinton and Phil Gramm, used educational deferments to avoid service until the danger was past. Others, like Dan Quayle, secured slots in the National Guard or another military service where they were highly unlikely to see combat.
I used an educational deferment for my four years of undergraduate schooling. Then, with the draft bearing down, I applied to my local draft board for classification as a conscientious objector.
It was not an easy case to make. I was not a member of a historically pacifist religious denomination. I lived in a conservative, rural community in southern Virginia where, for generations, when the call to arms came, men left the fields and took up the rifle. One of my great-grandfathers was wounded in Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg; another fought under Stonewall Jackson. My father served in the Army Air Corps in World War II.
It was no great surprise when I got notification of the draft board's decision: My application was denied.
I appealed the decision, which necessitated a personal interview before the three-man board. That turned out to be a grueling session punctuated by questions like: ``What if your mother was being attacked? Would you stand by and not come to her defense?''
Then I got a break. By a 2-1 vote, the board reversed itself and granted me conscientious objector status. I've always assumed the ``no'' vote came from the board member who was so concerned about my mother's defense.
I claim no special virtue from having taken the path I took. My success at avoiding the draft was due in no small part to my class, race and economic status. Because my family could afford to send me to college, I didn't have to face the draft as an 18-year-old. I had four years in which to grow and learn and begin to question authority, and I had access to draft counselors who knew the system and helped me use it to my advantage.
Others either couldn't or wouldn't do that. Some went to Canada, others to prison.
Some have suggested, Mr. McNamara, that your book vindicates those of us who avoided service. I can only speak for myself, but I made my own peace long ago. I feel no need for validation from the architect of ``McNamara's War.''
That epithet, by the way, isn't really fair to you. As will be clear to anyone who reads your book, the forces that led to the war were much larger than one man. Two big factors were anti-communist hysteria and an appalling ignorance about southeast Asia.
You have expressed the hope that your confessional might help the healing process. At the moment, it seems instead to have reopened a festering wound among those Americans who heeded the call to service - as well as the families of the 58,000 who died, and the tens of thousands more who were physically maimed or psychologically shattered.
Ultimately, though, maybe that's what it takes for true healing to occur. Truth and candor, even 20 years late, can, I think, be an antidote to the official dishonesty that bred such cynicism during the war years.
One interviewer asked why you didn't write this book 20 years earlier. ``I wasn't capable of it,'' you said. ``I wasn't as wise.'' At age 22, I would have scoffed at that explanation. Today, at 46, I'm more sympathetic.
In the interest of healing, though, I have one modest suggestion. Don't pocket the profits from your book. Establish a fund to benefit Vietnam veterans and the families of those who didn't come back.
It's the least you can do. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
BETTMAN/UPI
U.S. Marines remove bodies of their comrades from the battlefield
near Con Thien in 1969 after hand-to-hand combat with North
Vietnamese troops.
Color photos
George Duggins works for First Hospital Corp. in Norfolk. He is on
the national board of Vietnam Veterans of America.
Bill Sizemore is a staff writer at The Virginian-Pilot and The
Ledger-Star.
KEYWORDS: VIETNAM WAR by CNB